


Leave This Place

by kalliel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 'Damn we've been hunting a long time' fic, Brotherly Bonding, Case Fic, Cursed Dean, Emotional Baggage, Gen, Ghosts, I think it's time to reassess your life, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-22
Updated: 2013-09-22
Packaged: 2017-12-27 06:45:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Either you dismiss simplicity or you hide your timebombs in it, but nothing's ever really simple. Sam and Dean are forced to come to terms with the scorched earth they're not actually leaving behind. And after an unceremonious reunion with the Winchesters, Kat contends with the grisly future. Set post-S8.</p>
<p>Written for the prompt "Dean is cursed to hear everything being said about him."  It's more malicious than you'd think--wrong place, wrong time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leave This Place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [desertport](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=desertport).



[opening credits: "What Makes a Good Man?" - The Heavy](https://app.box.com/s/6kr696jcm7tawu19u0em)

SOUTH TUCSON, ARIZONA / SANTOS, BRAZIL

"Okay, so my mom was definitely not wearing that hat," says Gavin. He bobs off screen as he reaches for his soda, and the sudden movement forces the video into blocky pixels.

 "Why's that so hard to believe? You're the one who told her it looked funereal--and it was a funeral. I swear to god, she was wearing it the whole time!" Katherine's topcoat is almost done on her toes. A new OPI, glitter finish. She blows on them lightly, waits for the feed to get over itself and bring Gavin back. "Hang on, Skype's fucking up, I can't hear you."

 "I said, can you turn another light on?"

 Katherine laughs. "Why, you don't like the dusky sultriness of my bedroom the way it is?"

"I don't like all the shadows."

She sighs. "Just trying to save a little energy. Here, is that better?" She's grabbed the switch with her toes, works at it that way until the floor lamp floods the room. She turns the bedside table lamp off.

"No, keep that one on, too."

"Gavin, you're such a freak."

"No, that one just lights your face better."

 "Yeah, because you totally want to see my gross bed face." He does, actually, and she knows it. "Chris had his baby shower," she continues. "It was only a little bit awkward."

"Awkward?"

"'Cause, you know, kind of a weird pre-party for a funeral. Even for your family. And like, Chris with a baby on the way? Dude, that's crazy."

Gavin stops swaying in and out of the window, and his picture comes into clear focus. "It's not that crazy."

Katherine looks down at her toes and, satisfied, puts her toe spreader on the bedside table and curls into the covers. "This is going to sound dumb, but I kinda like falling asleep with you on Sky--"

 "--need to leave soon. There's an--oh. Sorry."

"Whatever, it's fine."

"Are the doors locked?"

"No, Gavin, I decided to switch it up tonight. Of course they're locked. I _am_ capable of living alone, you know--been doing it for a year."

"Two ghosts, Kat." 

Three ghosts, actually, but Gavin doesn't need to know about that.

"Just because Auntie Jenn didn't understand personal boundaries doesn't mean her ghost's gonna remember me, come on."

"You're right, forget it, forget it. Thanks for that, by the way. All the funeral stuff."

 "It's no problem."

"I'll reimburse you for all that shit, just e-mail me the invoice or whatever. I don't think Mom's gonna remember, or she's gonna pretend to not remember or something, so…"

"Right, I meant to ask. So for the whole extension thing, does Fulbright just mail you a check? Or is it direct deposit, or--? Just let me know if you want me to do anything stateside."

"Stop, I want you to stop," Gavin mutters.

"What?"

"Nothing. Must gave been static, or feedback or something. I'll take care of it."

Katherine sighs. "Don't freak out; I've got it covered. Just because you're not here--"

"Don't be like that, Kat; you're not stupid. You know things go wrong."

 "If you're not here, it just means I'll have one less person to accidentally shoot with rock salt, right?"

"Kat--"

"You don't remember, do you. See, this is the problem--you just never pay att--"

"Babe, I really do have to go. Tomorrow, though. We're not gonna have Wifi for the next few days, but I loaded my calling card, so…"

"I'll check in," says Katherine. The laptop is suddenly too hot against her chest; the fan kicks in and drowns out Gavin's platitude or whatever it is he's saying. And you know, fuck him. Whatever. "I'm gonna be busy tomorrow. Prepping."

"I said, I love you," Gavin repeats.

The window fills with Gavin, gray-green blocks of jagged color, and then he's gone. Katherine snaps the laptop shut, but keeps the weight of it on her until the fans have whirred down and it begins to pulse on standby. She takes a deep breath, and doesn't turn out the lights.

\--

PAROWAN, UTAH

"I _Skyped_ you because a tiny prophet let me know, and I quote, that 'my presence was more persuasive than the things that come out of my mouth'--not so you could Sherlock your ass over--Sam, jesus christ, hey, I realize this must be difficult for you, Samantha, but don't get distracted. Look at me. See this body language? It's supposed to say, Fuck you, Sam. Kind of like the words that came out of my mouth, which were--"

 "Fuck me, I know. But since I noticed you were at"--Sam cranes his neck to read the sign behind the bar once more, in person this time--"Big Greg's Gay Bar, I figured it was, you know, an innuendo or something."

"Go screw yourself." Dean turns away from Sam and directs his attention toward the blackboard behind the bar, apparently deep in thought. 

Sam seriously doubts Dean's interest in Big Greg's mixed drinks, or--Greg's mixed anything, he amends, when he realizes the scope and variety of the menu. "You're only digging yourself a deeper hole every time you open your mouth, dude. Seriously though, what the hell are we doing here?"

Dean shrugs. "It was quieter. At least no one here, in this real, actual room, is talking about me." 

Sam can feel the bass pulse through his stool. He also knows appraising glances when he feels them.

"Yes they are."

Dean grimaces. "Yes they are." He gets up, slips a few bills under his glass, and doesn't wait for Sam. He winks at a guy sitting a few stools away, with that dumb, "I'm so cool" smile that drives Sam up the wall. Scratch that, it's not Dean's smile Sam has an issue with; just the bizarre points at which Dean chooses to employ it.

 "Pull your thong down, Sammy." Dean waves a scrap of paper in front of him, beckons toward the door. "Hear tell our favorite fruity witch--or what's left of him--got shipped back home about a week ago. Looks like Comrade Nikita Nekrasov's been causing plenty of trouble down south. We're golden."

Sam hoped the outside air would hit him like a cleansing shock, but it's a muggy, lukewarm 2AM, and he is disappointed. "You know, if this is such a game to you," Sam pauses, and sidesteps a slick of garbage on the sidewalk. "Maybe we should just let it go. You can keep this curse forever. Is that what you're getting at, Dean? Ditch me, live happily ever after?"

"I'd love that, Sam. But you know, we have to finish the job, since that's something you _failed to do_ , remember?"

"You can be a real bastard, you know that?" Sam says, tight-lipped. Dean rolls his eyes.

 "No, I'm serious, Dean. I'm tired of having to talk through all this attitude. What's it all for? Are you making yourself a homemade bodyguard or something?"

Dean whirls around, catching Sam off guard. He grabs Sam's shoulder to keep him from falling from the curb. 

Dean takes a deep breath. "Fine, no attitude, Sam. If it's the truth you want: I ditched you because I didn't want to deal with you. Does that make you feel better?"

They finish the rest of the block in silence, until they hit the Impala. She's run up onto the curb, parking meter bent, a dull gray streak across her right side.

"What did you do?" Sam can't help but gape for a moment. The answer should be self-evident, but let's be honest, Sam's stunned. The obvious just seems...so unlikely.

Dean makes a noise, then heads for the passenger side. He tosses the keys at Sam's face. "This whole--it's surprisingly distracting sometimes. End of story. Just get in the car."

Dean's forehead is resting against the dashboard by the time Sam rounds the car and gets in.

"Hey," says Sam.

Dean slumps against the window instead.

"Dean."

Nothing.

They should go back to the motel, book a room for another night. It's been a long couple days. But Sam doesn't think he can stand any more down time; and he definitely can't survive having to start back up again in the morning. They're working off the momentum it took to get them into this close a proximity in the first place. If they shut down now they're only going to fly apart again, likely in a display of fury-charged, entropic fireworks. Sam clears his throat, and tries to settle in to the driver's seat as his phone finds its GPS satellites.

"Left," says Dean. "Turn left at the light. You'll see the signs for the freeway. You wanna take the 15 down, find 93 eventually."

"If you give me the address, I can just put it in. And you can try to sl--"

"Just take the 15."

Sam takes the 15. He's hoping for the freeway breeze, but there's night construction right out of the stating gate, and its orange lights coast over the windshield, advising caution. SLOW SLOW SLOW, as they crawl through a fog of asphalt dust and the sound of drilling.

"Dean," says Sam, six miles in, because Dean's not asleep yet. He looks faraway, dazed, the way Sam's come to associate with what Dean's imaginatively been calling "Dean Radio."

"They're thinking about closing the Sarah Blake incident," Dean replies. "Ruling it an acute allergic reaction, since their main suspects are dead. Were killed, actually. Multiple times."

"Good," says Sam, and lurches the car forward another four feet.

"Good?"

"You know what I mean."

"Of course, they might have linked it to the murder of Nikita Nekrasov."

"Fuck."

"The current working theory is that it's not Dean Winchester, or Sam Winchester. It's a cult vengeance thing, and our followers are carrying on our legacy and placing our prints at all the crime scenes. Our version of the Zorro slash, or something."

Sam drums the pads of his fingers against the steering wheel; he hadn't realized they'd tensed up so much. He keeps an even tone. "Well, that sounds kind of ridiculous."

"Since ours is currently 'our dead witch isn't dead enough, and he cursed me with Dean radio, and now we have to go kill his already-pretty-melty corpse,' I'm willing to give the 5-0 a free pass tonight." Dean rubs at his temples, and screws his eyes shut.

"It's a dumb curse, anyway."

Dean makes another noise.

"Dean?"

"--uh?"

"You good?"

"Just--don't speak."

Sam sighs. This rate they'll hit town around noon, assuming they only stop for gas and Sam drives as fast as he's learned to, these past eight years; no rest for the wicked was right. Sam's beginning to understand Dean's especial distaste for witches. It's late-blooming--Sam's always been more concerned with tooth and claw--but witches were always bullshit. Sam doesn't have the patience for them.

"Remember when we used to hunt wendigo?"

"Crowley did."

Sam doesn't have an answer to that, and anyway, he's just as turned off to conversation as Dean is. That's the whole reason they're on the road right now, sitting in this absurd traffic. It's not like he doesn't have plenty to stew over without dipping into Dean's. They're in that crumple zone, where the state of the universe isn't quite settled, and whatever bullshit's waiting under the surface--because frankly, it's all bullshit--hasn't yet announced itself. He doesn't know how they're both alive and isn't at all sure how long they're going to stay that way. Part of him is almost certain one of the orange lights skating over his hands, the windshield, the wheel, his brother won't be benignly urging caution, but will be the sun itself, ripping across the horizon as they grind slowly into oblivion before the rest of the world has even woken up. And he hates Dean for bringing up Sarah again, though it's about time the police closed her case. If there's one thing he and the law have in common now, it's that neither of them know when to give up.

Finally the traffic picks up, and Sam drives past bullshit bullshit bullshit, entire counties, hours, states of bullshit, towards some bullshit southward city Dean won't even tell him the name of.

"Merge left," says Dean. "The freeway splits in a few miles and no one tells you."

They hit the city in gradations, a slow wheezing anticlimax as the speed limit shrinks from 60, 45, 30, 25. Dean's been interspersing information in between his directions, telegraphic and unevenly matched with stretches of silence. One of the local papers--and Dean scoffs--has been covering the Nekrasov homecoming with the energy of an overzealous but distant family member, one Alina Nekrasova. The family proper has not made itself available for comment. Dean figures Alina's their best bet.

"Let me handle this one," says Sam, as they pull into the corporate lot, the paper located in some office suite high above them. Dean's not listening.

Correction, not listening to Sam. "You can hear whatever people are saying about you, right? Well, let's not add to that. Just lay low on this one. Okay?

 "--Okay?"

"I'm fine. Suite 314B." Dean exits the web browser and slides his phone into his pocket.

See, this is Sam's whole point. All of this was such bullshit. The lobby doors slide open for them--air conditioning, but old, and not that great--and Dean stops in front of the elevator as Sam makes for the stairs. Sam jerks back toward the elevator as Dean steps forward, toward the stairs.

"Fuck it." Dean keeps walking. Sam follows. 

"Alina's not here," says the girl in the first cubicle they hit. "She's getting ready for the funeral. Which I assume you're here for," says the girl, which sounds like that's not at all what she assumes. Otherwise, her expression is probing and impregnable in turns. She's blonde.

"Katherine," says Dean. Apparently her name is Katherine. "You're an editor here, right?"

 "Obituaries and local news," Katherine replies, without removing her graze from her screen or her fingers from the keyboard. "I also manage the paper's Twitter feed."

"So you'd have access to rough drafts, longer versions of all the articles in those sections."

"Not really. We're all online now, so length's not really a huge issue. If you're reading Alina's articles, you might have noticed."

Dean's got the charm turned up to eleven all right, but Katherine's not biting, isn't looking at them at all. "Is there any way we could see them anyway?" Dean asks, never mind that there's no conceivable, not-crazy justification for his request, as far as Sam can tell.

The good news is, Sam's not the only one who doesn't know when to quit, and lost causes love company. He nudges Dean. "Hey, hey. Come on. Are you ready to leave this place?"

Katherine jumps. "Wait." Inspects them both.

This can't be good.

"I know you."

"No," is Sam's instantaneous response. At the same time, Dean says, "He's not actually Xena."

"From the hospital--"

"No," Sam repeats. Dean says, "I meant Hercules."

"That stupid asylum--"

_"No,"_ says Sam. And Dean turns to Sam. "Fantastic." Then back to Katherine: "You friends with Martin? He's dead. And we're leaving. Nice talk."

Katherine's rounded the cubicle partition in an instant, ready to confront them at the stairwell, which, by Sam's estimation, is much further away than it was on their way up. Dean heads briskly toward the elevator.

"You're the guys who taught us about the rock salt," says Katherine, and rides the elevator down between them.

Ground floor.

"You're that girl," says Sam, as realization dawns. "You're Kat."

"No one calls me that anymore," says Katherine, just as Dean says, "That was you last night. You were talking about me. You said you almost shot me."

Katherine goes rigid. "What the fuck--?"

Dean gives the parking lot a quick scan. "Get in the car." He pushes Katherine toward the Impala.

It's then, it seems, that Katherine begins to register her mistake. "No," she says, and backs into Dean's arm. He pushes her forward again. "No, what--"

"Get in the car," he repeats. "We're not killing you, we're not kidnapping you, we're not going to torture you. But we are not having this goddamn conversation in a parking lot, so get in the car."

Katherine's in the back seat before it looks like she's entirely clear on the idea, much less in approval of it. And Sam hates himself a little, but with her hair mussed and sticky from the maneuver, her eyes wide with surprise and fear, he does recognize her.

"Kat," he says as he slams his door shut and the engine turns over. "It's Kat, right? I promise you--"

"Katherine," mumbles Kat. She's punching something into her phone that Sam sincerely hopes isn't 911.

"Turn right," says Kat, and not Dean. "You wanna take Henry Street all the way down, then a left at the train tracks. The complex has guest parking."

Sam regards her in the rearview mirror. "You're taking us...home?"

Kat looks up from her phone. "You killed Nikita Nekrasov, didn't you," as though it's supposed to somehow explain her actions. "That's why you're here. They said it was some kind of gay thing--salt to 'purify'--but… But that was you, wasn't it."

Neither of them answer.

Kat's still on her phone. "You're those serial killers, from last year. And…from a couple…years ago, but how, but--"

Sam hates smartphones.

Apropos of--well, who knows--Dean whips forward, hisses an indiscernible collection of consonants. " _Fuck!_ "

And Sam: "Dean--"

Kat finally looks up. Looks straight at Sam through the rearview mirror before Sam's own attention snaps to Dean. 

She says, "But you're both dead."

\--

Katherine comes to terms with two things the moment she lets Sam and Dean Winchester into her apartment: 

1) They're not going to stop calling her Kat, and  
2) Now _they're_ worried, they have to be, because

it looks like she stole an entire funeral, never mind a body. A full collection of casseroles she'd left out all day, all the floral arrangements, slightly jaunted and wilting from their trip up the stairs to her complex. The large Kinko's prints of Auntie Jenn's portrait, an inexplicably large number of boxed sugar cubes--Costco, unused. Files, invoices, receipts, catalogues, all on the ground where they'd slipped from her arms the night before.

"Wow," says--she's pretty sure that one's Sam, as though he'd never seen the aftermath of a funeral before. Carcass of, really. (With all due respect, Auntie Jenn.)

"I didn't call the cops because I know what you do," says Kat, though they hadn't bothered asking. It sounds weird to her, because even as a child she'd never been a snitch, but her tactic had always been plausible deniability. _I'm not gonna call the cops, because I can't prove I knew it was crack. Just--throw it away._

_I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you have a license for that gun._

_Maybe you really did think you'd already paid for that._

Now it was more like, _I know you killed that man; so hey, let me take you to my place._

"There are a couple misdemeanors on my rap sheet," says Kat, even though they still haven't bothered asking--or answering. "I hope you earned your…felonies…the same way."

 "We've probably got a lot more people killed than we've actually _killed_ killed, if that's any consolation," says Dean, as he moves around Auntie Jenn's tribute in her entryway. He quickly flicks his gaze up and down the exhibit, then mutters under his breath, "Definitely the lair of a hardened criminal."

Kat's cell phone chirps in the pocket of her jeans. Gavin, finally, Gavin. "Please eat casserole. There are some extra plastic forks and stuff somewhere in there," she says, and gestures vaguely toward Auntie Jenn in grayscale. "I'm just gonna take this, and--"

Sam whispers something that sounded a lot like, "--the fuck are we here, then, Dean?"

Whatever. She's never been a fan of ice breakers. She and the Winchesters already know more about each other than she ever really wanted--that is, anything at all. Her phone chirps again. "Give me fifteen, and then we can talk shop."

Kat slips into the bathroom and props her phone up on her small toiletries shelf, leaning it against the mirror as she grabs a brush and tries to let it do its business.

hey sorry met ethnographer, says the first. last night was balls sry for that too

She slides a couple hair ties from her wrist--elastic broken, overstretched, but they still work and she can't let them go--and winds them into a functional ponytail.

rly hoping youll get back to me soon about decembr

i miss you

i want to see you

we can eat guavas

and cannd sardines

and hate fuckin bank of aerica together

She splashes her face with water, wipes loose angel wisps back from her face with the excess.

u there?

Then she pockets her phone, grabs the iPad from the bedroom on the way out, and finds Sam and Dean Winchester exactly where she left them, more or less.

"If you guys could sit closer together, like you were before, yeah, there we go. There we go… I can get this set up so that--" Her USB projector flicks blue, no signal, and shuffles back between her iPad screen and blue as she toggles the connector. "There." Balancing the projector on the sugar cubes, and the iPad against her knee, Kat brings her case notes into clear, if slightly slanted, focus. "If you're after Nikita Nekrasov, that's great, because I've been working backwards--towards him. First up, there's his two victims, Li Hing Ping, and uh. Well. Jennifer Williams, Auntie Jenn. Whom you've met. Sort of."

She scrolls down through her data until she hits bottom and it bounces up a few centimeters on the ricochet. "Never knew each other when they were alive. I'm guessing wrong place, wrong time. But they were all shown and cremated at the funeral home next door. And those are the highlights, I guess. Questions?"

"...You have a funeral home next door?"

 "We also have vaulted ceilings and great natural light. Shut up."

"Can I see that?" Sam seems to be impressed by the color-coded hypertext she'd been using to link the three ghosts.

"We do it at the paper," Kat offers. "Good stuff. Great resume fodder."

Dean gives her set-up the same once-over with which he'd regarded Auntie Jenn's tribute. "Kids these days."

"May I?" Kat asks Sam, before she unplugs the projector from her iPad. Then she turns back to Dean. "And dude, I'm 26."

\--

"Fuck, I really need to take this." Kat's phone chirps again, and with the promise that she'll be right back, she vanishes.

"Something's up." Sam's sure of it. It seems wildly unlikely that they pulled anyone into hunting--willingly, in any case. Willing and still alive. All of this about--and Sam scans the mobile funeral they're sitting in the middle of--Auntie Jenn, and the phone calls; it all had to add up somehow.

"Isn't this how most of our work relationships go?" says Dean. "We always team up with whoever pops out of the woodwork, don't ask too many questions, and mutually abuse each other's assets. Only difference for today is, no one had to beat information out of anyone first. This is the epitome of team work, Sam."

Except Kat's not--hell if Sam knows. He almost makes mention of surly backwater hunters who've spent too much time bleeding at the back of dark caves and not enough time editing local newspapers, but thinks better of it. 

"Dean," says Sam. Dean's up and circling the perimeter of Kat's living room, probably doing the opposite of trying to find the proverbial 3G.

 "Dean." He's losing him. Fuck it.

"Three ghosts," says Sam. "Judging from Kat's timeline, Nikita gets shipped back here, and Li and--Auntie Jenn--end up dead. And also ghosts. He's gotta be the key, right? Ghosts don't just--" See, this is why Sam's getting the witch hate now. They are bastards. Statistically, two deaths in the same town on the same night equalling two ghosts was way off the norm. Sam's all for the right to die, but this is an abuse of the buddy system.

Great, now he's thinking up his own annoying Dean quips. This whole thing was grossly unfair.

"Dean."

Whatever. Sam keeps briefing. "We know… that Li and Auntie Jenn were cremated. But we know they're still ghosts. And if Nikita's the link, then he must have tripped up their spirits and tied them here with something else. Any ideas? Dean."

Sam sighs. It's a dumb curse anyway. If Dean would just ignore the extra white noise as well as he ignored Sam, maybe it would be less of an impediment. Not that Sam can blame him, exactly. Judging from Dean's updates, the bulk of conversations about Dean Winchester involve a growing number of federal conspiracy theories and a smattering of armed vigilantes who'd rather they were dead. Which is…inspiring. Generally they whip through town, cauterize the area, and try not to hit the same place twice; it's a big country with poor infrastructure and a lot of blind spots.

Even so, most things don't tidy up all that well, no matter what kind of precautions you take (and they don't, generally--Sam's calculated that by this point, it's a path of diminishing returns), and setting fire to a manipulative and domineering witch is currently topping the list of doesn't-clean-well. Sam counts it a blessing of divine intervention that no one noticed the Apocalypse that one time, because it feels like the entire damn world has been hearing about this one stupid witch.

Dean's making his rounds at Sam's back when Sam grabs his sleeve, gets up to cut Dean off. "Dean, hey. Hey. We are working a case. We're working a case--ignore him. Them. Whatever. It's just white noise."

Dean won't look at him, won't look up, like he's emerging from a dark place and it's suddenly too bright. "Fuck you, I can't," he says.

Again with the fuck yous. Sam regards him squarely. "Yes, you can."

Dean pushes him off, one part frustration and another disgust. Sam doesn't think the latter is entirely deserved. "I. _Can't_."

"Well, I don't know what to do." This is all Dean's fault. Except it's actually not this time. It's probably Sam's fault--a fact Dean certainly hadn't wasted any time pointing out. But when a witch's dying words were an--absurd, seemingly arbitrary--curse directed at your brother, obviously you're not going to wait around to see if his corpse had smoldered properly. If something could "smolder properly." And if there's something wrong with that, then Sam would like to have some words with triage, as a concept, so that they might discuss some of its more ambiguous cases.

 "Then don't do anything, Sam. I'm not asking you to do anything. Just shut up."

Sam swallows. He can think of any number of insults entirely appropriate to the situation. And there are plenty of things he could say about Dean that he doesn't think he'd have any trouble justifying. Hell, a handful of them probably need saying. But what it boils down to is this: He doesn't know what to do. And it doesn't matter what he says. If he doesn't know exactly what to do, or exactly what to say, he's not going to throw in something half-baked, not if he has a choice. They have to do enough of that as it is.

 "Fine," he says, which is not giving up, it's not.

 "I did have a good thought, though," Dean offers.

"What."

"Since all the angels are, uh, excommunicated, angel radio has been cancelled for the season."

"Okay."

"So I figure, there's an eight percent less chance my ears will start bleeding, and then my head will explode."

\--

"What do you mean, eight percent? Why only eight?" Sam.

 "No one actually picks arbitrary numbers, Dean." Sam again.

"Lay it on me, 'cause I am wide open here. I've got all the time in the world." Sam again.

Kat asks Gavin to hold up; she can only handle a single one-sided conversation at a time. Gavin replies faster than she thought he could even type: ntbing one siderd.

She takes the hallway to collect herself, and tries to remember what the Winchesters were like, that first night. She tries to see if they are anything like that now. Generally, Kat hedges the existential--two years of editing op-eds for her journalism class in high school burned out her patience on the falsely philosophical early on--but they were strangers then, and are strangers now. If there's something about them that makes ghost-killing a rock solid character reference, she needs to know what it is.

Because when she looks at them, she doesn't trust them. Not really. She doesn't trust them with her secrets, her dreams, her love life. They aren't Tricia, Alex, Gavin--and let's be real, she hasn't seen Alex beyond Facebook in months and Gavin's been in Brazil for a year. She doesn't know the Winchesters, and she never did. To Kat they were a presence, a rescue team. But there weren't words of encouragement from them, no shock blankets, and she sent no thank-you letters scribbled in crayon, unlike the cards she had her church group kids write to the fire department. She can't even remember whether they said goodbye before they drove off in their fancy, creepy car. 

Whatever happened eight years ago, the Winchesters aren't exactly her centerpiece for the whole experience. 

She remembers the dark. She remembers losing Gavin, feeling a ghost's breath on her neck, its hands on her arm. She remembers feeling the sawed-off in her hands, heavy, instruction-less, and she remembers being terrified that she wouldn't remember how to shoot it--like getting back in your parent's minivan when you come home from college, or diving into a pool for the first time all summer. She remembers she had plans to guard lap swim the next morning. She remembers being stupidly concerned that if she died tonight, they weren't going to be able to find a sub in time. She remembers standing alone in that asylum (with Gavin, not alone), hoping that the cops would come, and wondering what they would think about her if they did. Holding a gun like that. (Alone.)

She remembers Sam--because it was Sam, wasn't it--asking, "Are you ready to leave this place?" and she remembers not leaving. Not being able to leave.

Sometimes she'll close her eyes--in the middle of the day, in the suite's bright, noisy cafeteria, in the middle the busiest work weeks--and she'll still feel that breath on her neck. Her elbow will twitch, and she'll feel twiggy fingers around it.

And she knows: She still hasn't left yet.

 "So, do you actually work for the paper? Or is this like, a hunter thing, or what?" asks Sam. "Not to be out of the blue."

All right, so it was out of the blue. Kat finds her bearings in reality again, and answers slowly. "Yes… I really do work for the paper. No, I wasn't actually working today. I just had a couple more things to look up for the--ghost. Thing. And I had some loose ends to tie up because I left early yesterday to prep for the funeral--right. Anyway. That's the whole reason we moved out here."

"The ghosts?" asks Sam.

Kat frowns. "The journalism."

Her phone chirps. im wide open here

"Need some air," says Dean.

"Keys?" asks Sam.

if i did smth youd tell me right? kat

Dean waves Sam off.

 "Hey." Sam waits for Dean to turn back from the door and look at him. "You good?"

i hope you trust me that much, Kat texts back.

Dean's expression darkens. "I'm fine."

He leaves.

its just hard to tell ina text msg

i'm fine, Kat texts back, and shoves her phone in her pocket.

Deep breath.

Another one. Sam's sitting on her coffee table, and the expression on his face kind of reminds her of a puppy that's been left behind.

"Sam," she says, with a nod toward the door. "I... don't think 'fine' always means--"

"I know what it means," Sam snaps. He's not facing her anymore, but immediately his shoulders slump with the burden of contrition. Under his breath, _"Fuck,"_ though Kat hears him anyway.

"I don't know," she says. "I'm sorry--I'm just. I'm kind of a mess, with the funeral, and then the ghosts, and there actually are deadlines at work and stuff, and, like-- I don't know."

She didn't even like her high school journalism class that much. And now she's an editor for the local paper? And obituaries, seriously? Everyone has their weird career story, and hey, any job is a happy ending, but she _chose_ this. She chose all of it. She's never gone looking for ghosts, but she's found more than a dozen, and only within spitting distance.

Maybe they're right. Maybe she's here for the ghosts. Maybe--

"It's fine," says Sam. "No, it's really okay," he rephrases.

"And I'm--sorry for all the text messaging. My boyfriend, Gavin, my same--my same boyfriend. He's in Brazil right now and we're, just--"

"Still together, huh?" Sam says.

Does he not believe her? "Yeah," she says, more forcefully than she'd meant.

Sam chuffs. "No, I mean. That's gotta be, what, eight years now, at least? I mean, congratulations." Sam rises from her coffee table and circles back to her iPad. "To be honest, I can't… I can't even imagine--"

"Yeah," she says, softer now. "It's a long time." She decides Sam doesn't need to know about the "break" years, the "mutually agreed-upon exploratory months," the angry three-week break ups and stupid ( _stupid_ stupid) infidelities. She fingers her phone in her pocket. It would be wildly out of context to text him back, I FUCKING LOVE YOU, but she almost does. She almost texts him, the same way she almost really fucking loves him.

She snatches her hand from her phone and loops her thumbs into her back pockets instead. "So! Uh, you and Dean, you've just been going around, hunting ghosts and stuff all this time?"

"Some ghosts," Sam says.

 "Any kernels of advice?"

He laughs, unconvincingly. "Only bad ones."

\--

"Air, huh?" Sam crinkles his nose. Dean is dry-heaving behind the 2000-block Dumpsters, if the stenciled numbers are anything to go by. The white's begun to rust around the edges, fans out in a crackle of gray, orange, and blue. "And by air you meant sulfur and methane, not that sissy oxygen stuff."

"Ugh," Dean replies. Sam slaps him on the back.

There's a retaining wall that makes a nook for the Dumpsters. It faces away from the apartments, toward a gravel-paved service road bordered on the other side by a municipal chain-link fence. The set-up is meant to be aesthetic, Sam supposes. Sort of. Dean says he's glad he stayed away from that casserole, and slides down to sit against the retaining wall. Sam joins him.

"And I think I'm getting Telemundo now."

Sam comes to terms with the uncomfortable wetness seeping through the bottom of his pants, and hopes sincerely that it is weather of some kind. Morning dew. Muggy condensation. He tries not to think about the fact that this is Arizona, it's summer, and it's the middle of the afternoon. "It's probably Portuguese, actually," Sam replies, shifting up to a much safer squat. "Gavin's in Brazil."

"Who?"

"Kat's been texting her boyfriend, Gavin, in Brazil. He's what's up with her weirdness--not, you know, something supernatural. She probably didn't leave out the part where she's feeding dead serial killers her Aunt Jenn's cass--"

"--No casserole." Dean knocks his head back against the retaining wall and takes a deep, slow breath.

And what's Sam supposed to do? Hug him? Sure, Sam doesn't know what to do, but he's also not entirely sure what he's supposed to be doing anything about. The best explanations Dean's offered are "Dean radio" and "Go outside, no just--go. Go! Now say something about me. I'm gonna close the door. There. You said it was 3AM and that I'm a dick." Honestly, pretty juvenile as far as curses go--just a bunch of bullshit. So Sam doesn't understand why this is slamming Dean so hard. Even if there were a hundred people talking about Dean, if Dean has ever needed a quiet place to be able to think, he's never shown it--and he's in the wrong profession. And it's not like he's Justin Timberlake; Sam's not even sure they know a hundred people who aren't dead yet. But maybe they do. He'd forgotten about Kat. And now even Brazil, or some infinitesimally small piece of it, knows about Dean, too.

"So, Dean radio, from the 80s, 90s, and now. It's like…a roomful of extra voices?" 

Lame, Sam. Very, very lame.

"More like multiverse," says Dean. He furrows his grow. "Non-consensual multiverse. Which I guess is pretty much Nikita's spe--"

"Multiverse," repeats Sam. "So like…?"

"It feels like I'm in all these places at once, like I'm actually in the room--with every goddamn person who decides to mention me. How hard is that to understand? Jesus."

Sam closes his eyes. "You're the one who said multiverse. Which that isn't, by the way."

"Garth just gave my phone number to someone in _Havana_ ," Dean interjects. "And those hunters from Philly? Yeah, they're still pissed. And the Ghostfacers are 'blogging' now."

Sam flexes his calves, and wishes Dean could've had this conversation inside, sitting on chairs or something. "Hey, at least they love you, right?"

Dean nods. "Yeah, and so does Hell," he mutters, without elaboration.

See, that would be multiverse. Sort of. "What about Purgatory?"

A shrug. "Not really that articulate over there."

"Like I'm supposed to answer to all of these fucking people," Dean continues. "That's what it feels like. Like I'm supposed to have some kind of, I dunno, response. Plate's full with what we have right in front of us, I don't-- What the fuck am I supposed to do? Write an empathy card to our goddamn atom trail? What?"

Dean slams his fist against the retaining wall.

"Oh, and East Hall Middle School can't figure out where to send my invitation to their 20-year reunion."

"Jesus."

"I know. What kind of middle school has reunions?"

"--Look, I'm sorry. This one's on me, I should've--" Should've what? Made sure Nikita Nekrasov was really, _really_ dead before he checked on the murky alley heap that at some point earlier, had been Dean? Seriously? "No, never mind," Sam breaks off. "Like hell. You know what? Like hell I'm sorry about that, I--"

"No, you know what, Sam? Fuck it. I'm tired."

Fuck, not this again. Apathetic devastation is one of Dean's default modes, but that doesn't keep Sam's stomach from twisting, keep every joint in his hands from feeling like snapping glass when he reaches for Dean's shoulder.

"--I'm tired of slogging through all this bullshit--"

Sam yanks Dean back down when he tries to rise, and ends up almost facedown in the trash that didn't quite make it before he catches his own balance. "Stop, look. Dean." 

Dean stops and looks. The focused precision of Dean's scrutiny is searing; Sam almost regrets asking for it. 

"Look. Our one crazy witch turned into a crazy witch ghost, which is now three ghosts, and potentially a growing army of new ghosts. That's called a pattern of escalation." Dean shakes Sam's hand from him, and Sam rubs the gravel out of his other palm, smearing god-only-knows down the seam of his jeans. 

"You may have noticed, that's basically our life. And that sucks."

Dean gets up again. Fucking hell; he's not even going to let Sam finish. "But this one? We can put an end to it--tonight. That we can do."

Dean extends Sam a hand up. "Or Kat can. She's got this, Sam, she really does."

"No she doesn't. That's why she asked for help. She asked for _our_ help, Dean. So if you're not gonna do this for me, at least--"

Dean doesn't reply, but he does start back toward Kat's apartment building. It's better that he doesn't ask, Sam thinks. It's not Kat who called for help.

\--

Kat hates--hates--what she looks like when she cries. She splashes her face with water for the second time in a few hours and takes a series of deep breaths, in an attempt to will her complexion away from strawberry.

"Were you close to the deceased?"

Kat startles, smacks her head on the underside of the small shelf above the sink, and feels her cell phone bounce from the shelf and off her shoulder.

Sam catches it. "Sorry."

Kat flushes all over again. "Why the hell--would you--" 

"Sorry," Sam repeats. "The door was open, so I figured--"

Kat's definitely spent too much time living alone. She wipes her face with the back of her sleeve and accepts her phone from Sam. "She's Gavin's Auntie Jenn. I mean, I'd met her a couple times, but you know, whatever, right? We were just--I was just, you know, I was in town. And Gavin's mom, she was pretty broken up about it, so I told her I'd handle everything."

"Wow."

"I mean, it's not like she was a stranger, but--"

"So you two are pretty serious--you and Gavin, I mean."

"I don't really think it's any of your business," says Kat, and feels like an asshole for saying it. She doesn't know why she's being so defensive about it. "I mean, I'm sorry, but."

"Sorry, no, I'm just trying to figure out, you know, how…"

"Can we just talk about the case?"

Sam gives her a look like that's what he's trying to figure out. Like, _How the hell did you end up like this?_

 "I didn't get into this because of Auntie Jenn, if that's what you're looking for. This isn't personal." Except it is, isn't it--is there really any other option? In fact, she kind of wants to blame Sam; _you asked me if I wanted to leave, and we couldn't. We couldn't--_ but that's not fair at all. He's not the one who dragged Gavin out on another bad date, four years later. He's not the one who kept looking.

"Nah, never mind. Just trying to be friendly."

He sucks at it. Kat checks herself before she says anything aloud; she knows a bad mood when she tastes one. She motions for Sam to lead the way back to her living room.  
 "Still, though," Sam continues. "You and Gavin must be pretty serious, if you're that close with his family. I mean, how many people would you trust with your sister's funeral?"

Fuck it. "You really suck at this."

Sam blows out a defeated puff of air. "Shit, sorry," he says. "It's just--it's been a really long year. Sorry."

Dean is scrolling through her iPad in the living room. "The funeral home is next door? Seriously?" greets Dean.

"I told you, it's not a coincidence."

"And neither are our three ghosts," says Sam. "Nikita's gotta be controlling them. We gotta keep tabs on all of them somehow."

"There's no way we can go after them one after the other. They're not gonna wait in line," adds Kat.

"But we're not splitting up," says Sam.

"No, definitely not. I mean, I don't want to, anyway. We'll have to draw them out together."

"With what?" asks Sam. "They're not dogs. We can't just--"

"Yeah, they are." Dean finally looks up from Kat's iPad.

Kat waits for an explanation, as does Sam.

"They don't make lights flicker because it's creepy," Dean offers as an--oblique, as far as Kat's concerned--explanation. "The EMF, the video cameras. Anything that's on their frequency--they're gonna be all over that."

Sam allows it. "So, what, a supernatural honeypot?" A police scanner and a couple of cell phones aren't going to offset the rest of the city. We'd need--"

"I got it covered. TV, laptops, Xbox, iPads--I mean, we could probably wire a small town with just the living room."

 Dean again: "You realize it's all probably going to explode, and then catch fire."

 Kat shrugs. "Gavin's not using it, is he. It's all his stuff."

Sam and Dean exchange glances.

"Okay, well," says Sam. "Middle of nowhere's not a great bet, but we'll need somewhere secluded."  
   
"Out back?" Dean offers. "You saw that retaining wall. I mean, if I were going to kill anyone--" 

"Good enough," says Sam, at the same time Kat says, "Can we not talk about that?"

There's a disconnected pause, until Kat fills it with, "So what do we need? I've got all the--"  
   
"Like 400 aspirin," says Dean. 

"--usual stuff."

"The remains. Which I guess are--wow, that is convenient," says Sam.

"I told you it wasn't a coincidence. I already have the keys, from the funeral yesterday. I had to tear down after hours because Lee and Auntie Jenn had back-to-back fu--er, anyway. I have the keys."

"Saves us a break-in, I guess. And we've got, what, a couple hours to kill before it's after hours."  
 "I'm not kidding about the casseroles, guys. Eat them."

Sam is visibly disturbed by the prospect. He quickly volunteers to go prep the Dumpster and the pyre.

"Oh my god, seriously?"

Very seriously. Sam puts her and Dean to the task of getting the living room de-wired. "Since you're familiar with the funeral home, you guys can go get the remains and bring them around," he adds. "I'm gonna get some stuff from the car."

Once he's gone, Kat turns to Dean. "Casserole?" 

"Aspirin."

See, Kate hates this kind of situation. "Are you okay?" she asks. Part of her wants to help, and the other part is proud of her lifelong, principled aversion sticking her nose in other people's business. It's not really her thing.

"Dean?"

"Shut up."

Wo-o-w, Kat mouths, and redirects her attention to the speaker system. Okay then. 

The wiring in the back is 100% Gavin. If there's one thing that can be said about him, he doesn't mess around with his home theater systems--Klipsch, she remembers. She remembers Gavin's insistence that it had to be Klipsch. She wonders if he's moved on from all of that. There's nothing about this house that matched up with anything he'd told her about in the last year. Nothing except for her.

The Klipsch is color-coded with painter's tape, over-long cords strapped together with computer ties, and overall just a orderly as she would have imagined, but there's something about the meticulous forest that reminds her of a bomb waiting to be diffused--or ignited. Like one wrong move and the whole order of it goes to hell.

"Gavin's not really in Brazil, is he." Dean, above her.

"He really is." She's almost as confused by the insinuation as she is by Dean's interest in and proximity to her.

"Use this," he says, and drops a switchblade in front of her face. "There's no way this doesn't get messy, so there's no point in trying to avoid it."

"He really, really is," Kat repeats, and takes the knife. "You're in my light."

Dean moves. "So Gavin's not--there's not tropical Heaven euphemisms, going on here--"

"Sorry? No?" For people who don't seem that interested in sharing, these Winchesters guys seemed pretty interested in getting other people to. "It's called a long-term, long-distance relationship? They exist? I'm kinda starting to feel like a zoo animal, so…"

Kat's phone chirps.

And again.

And again.

And again. Oh god, he's calling.

"Are you going to get that?"

"Gavin has his shit together," Kat says simply. "I don't."

"Don't break him," says Dean.

"Wow, none of your business?" Kat sneezes. Clean cords does not a clean house make.

"But that's why you're not talking to him, isn't it. You don't--"

 "I'm not talking to him," Kat sniffs, "Because I don't want to move to Brazil. I don't want to get married. I don't want kids. Except I do want kids. I do want to get married. And I don't really have anything against moving to Brazil."

 "Oh, well, problem solved, then. Here, just--move--I got this--"

Dean swings the oversized speaker over her head, and Kat follows the cords behind the TV.

"No, my problem is, I don't want to do any of it _now_ , at least, I don't know--I mean-- Gavin's been talking strollers since before he left, down to the kind of wheels he wanted on it. And I just, I-- You can borrow the bedroom, you know, if you need a nap. I can--"

"Did you seriously just say that."

"Just offering. You just look really--"

"Nap time, Kat? See, now I believe you. You've been texting Gavin about strollers and nap times and--bassinets--all damn day, haven't you."

"You just seem kind of--"

"It's been a really long," Dean's voice catches, "--forever. Sue me."

Kat gathers up the last of the cords. "That's what Sam said, too."

"I have an old car battery," Kat continues. "That'd work, right? At least for a while?"

 "Long enough. Uh, why--"

"Because I used to have a car. Now I don't. It was a personal choice, okay?" Which isn't entirely true, it never really us. But goddamn. "Everything is some big mystery for you guys. It's possible to just--total a car. It's possible to have a boyfriend--yes, even me. And yes, I can actually work for a newspaper. Why can't you guys believe any of this? Haven't you ever heard of Occam's Razor?"

"See, that's my life philosophy; Occam's Razor. Sam, on the other hand--"

_"Dean."_

"What."

"You know what? Never mind." It's not her fight. "You ready to take the first load? If you can get part of the Klipsch, I can go grab the battery, and we can take the rest down all in one more go."

It makes Kat feel like she's moving out, with the living room gutted like that. She's actually thinking about how many more trips it'd take to put the whole house in the Dumpster before she realizes that they're done, they're not taking any more, she's not going anywhere.

"Maybe I should just grow up," Kat says suddenly. "You know, get with the program." She should just leave. She's clearly thinking about it, so why not? She should make the leap--drop everything. Why bother with a two-week notice, why bother finding a sublet. She's twenty-six and with the exception of a couple ghost-fights and one journalism retreat gone awry, she hasn't done anything crazy yet. Maybe it's just a rite of passage. "I just need to grow up. I can handle all of those things; I just need to make the leap."

"You know, sometimes growing up involves-- _not_ chasing after any of those things," says Dean.

It's not really what Kat wants to hear. 

"Don't get me wrong," she starts. She never wants to be That girl. She never wants to be "all about Gavin." But she's got everything else figured out, it's all going, it's all working. She's being obsessive, and she knows it, and maybe it's stupid, and maybe it's setting her gender back a thousand years. But fuck them all, honestly. If she's going to obsess over a problem, she needs to have a damn good reason, and the love of her life is a pretty good one.

"But I love him," she says. "I want him. I want all those things with him someday. I just--"

"I want urns full of dead people," says Dean. "Tonight."

\--

"You look like shit." 

"Don't worry, we weren't having sex."

"I'm going to shoot you on purpose this time, you-- _bro._ " Kat hands an urn off to Sam, and slides a laquered box under the Dumpster. "This is the last of it. I can hook up the battery, and then we're basically set."

Sam nods.

Three urns and their personal effects. One Kat, who hourly reminds Sam more and more of Jo. And it's terrible because mostly Sam just thinks, this is how old Jo was the night she died.

He banishes the thought.

Three urns, one Kat, and one Dean--who really does look like shit. Which, again, is not exactly off the norm, but that's the whole problem, isn't it. He's tired, that much is obvious. He braces himself against the massive speakers now standing a few feet from the Dumpster for a few fragile seconds. When he heaves Nikita Nekrasov's urn into the Dumpster for safekeeping, it's clear he has no desire whatever to be bothering. But they've also been through enough shitstorms to know Dean will be fine; Sam can trust that much. Cursed or not, Dean will be fine for the job tonight. What Sam's concerned about is tomorrow--about two, three weeks from now, when Dean finally throws a gear, derails.

Sam maintains that it is, fundamentally, a dumb curse. But it's a bad mix, and it's that incremental, creeping danger that will always be the death of them.

"I can feel you cruising me, Sam. What the hell."

"Don't get all anger management on me," Sam begins, voice low, and pulls Dean's sleeve toward him. He doesn't want Kat to hear but he still wants Dean to listen.

Dean's eyes narrow. "Off to a good start, Sammy."

"Look, I know why you're angry at me. I didn't believe you about the curse thing--"

"Under the bridge, Sam."

Right. Because things that go under the bridge always stay there. "But think about it. This--" Dean looks drawn, overtaxed and overstretched. Guilt fatalism shame. "This is not the curse. I'm with you 100 percent, it's a pretty wicked catalyst but this--this is bigger. This is deeper. And I need to know--"

Dean steps from him, and opens toward Kat. "You have bed head, and you smell like a Dumpster. Let me think of all the dots _I_ can connect. Are you done, Sam? Or do you want me to make you a little tin hat to go with your crazy?"

Sam's practically quivering with frustration, but he keeps his mouth shut. "That Dumpster's loaded with explosives. I went ahead and hooked it up with this--" He hands a small remote off to Kat. "So once we figure out how the hell Nikita's running all this, he's gone."

 "We don't even know if Nikita's controlling anything," Kat objects.

"Li and Auntie Jenn are cremated. Their life histories are actually more bland apart than they are put together. Jenn asphyxiated--some bruising, suspected allergic reaction anyway--and Li had an aneurysm. If--and yeah, it's a big if--" Sam acknowledges, "Nikita's controlling them, we need to figure out how. He's a ghost--a very well-trained, extremely magical ghost--so we're just gonna have to hope it's something he brings to the party tonight."  
 "That's a lot of ifs," says Kat.

"We have explosives," says Dean. "We're good. And once we get this hooked up," Dean scuffs his boot along the side of a pile of Toshiba products, "We're starting this showdown on our terms. We've got the edge over them."

He neglects to mention that it's a pocket-knife edge on a situation that probably warrants at least a machete, but it's clear from Kat's derisive snort that she's well aware of that. But her derision doesn't keep her fingers from trembling as she works through the finishing touches on their ghost honeypot.

Sam, on the other hand. It's hard for Sam to be scared of this anymore. Not shit-your-pants scared, but scared enough to give a damn. Maybe this is a consequence of Sam's upbringing, but to him fear has a lot to do with respect, and Sam lost all respect for this kind of thing a long time ago. He's seen the cogs turn and he's watched even those cogs be forged, and they've come a long damn way from one crazed ghost in one haunted asylum. To Sam, everything is about as legitimate and insidious as Pepper's ghost. Once you've seen it all from the deep end, it's hard to pay your dues to anything short of transverse dimensional warfare. 

The problem is, ghosts don't stop being dangerous. They can't be profiled; their motives only make them unpredictable. The most deadly weapon a ghost has is its victim's ignorance, and then their inability to suspend disbelief. For Sam, both those things walked out the door a long time ago. You can be stronger, faster, better-oiled, but at the end of the day a ghost is a ghost; and to be over-jaded is its own type of disbelief.

Kat's scared. She's precise and efficient and tuned in in a way Sam's not sure he can be anymore. He tries to step up to her frequency, that level of hyperattention, but it feels like climbing into something jagged and alien now.

"Kat." Sam motions to the side of the honeypot nearest him with a nod of his head.

"This is the last of it," she says, switching on the stereo. It broadcasts a heavy, bass static. "And Kat's a scared teenager. I'm Katherine now."

Sam chuffs. "Katherine's a scared twenty-six year old. What difference does it make?"

And electric snap rips through the speaker set; the hum of static drops out, flickers back in stages. Another crack. Kat's phone chimes. She glances at it, but there's another crack and she throws it into the pot and jumps back. "Yeah, she is--" The sound and look of adrenaline all through her. She turns to Sam. "--because I'm not hiding. You ready for this, _Sammy?"_

Something screams. Nikita Nekrasov screams, and he sounds in death exactly as he did in life. The register is immaculately human, bounded, chilling. The too-familiar noise of immolation all over again. The static surges, riffs, like a tidal wave of electric current's crashing through it, and Sam feels Arizona's 85 degree dusk plunge a couple lines of latitude.

A small, chemical, pop. An explosion of sparks. A thunderous crack, like an electric rattle snake. And there's Lee and Auntie Jenn.

Electricity arcs through their makeshift honeypot. Sam smells ozone and burning plastic, and this is probably why they've never made something like this before.

Nikita Nekrasov screams again. Dean drops, both hands clasped over his ears, and matches the ghost for volume.

 "Dean!" Because why not add to the cacophony. The honeypot throws sparks, but Sam shields his face and makes a run towards Dean. They're playing a close field, it's not that far, but the ghosts are faster than Sam is.

This is exactly the kind of--

Nikita Nekrasov plunges his hand through Dean's chest, slams him against the side of the Dumpster. Dean crackles blue at Nikita's every point of contact, and goes limp.

Sam hits the ground for the angle, and gets off two shots before Nikita's on him, instead of Dean. Kat follows with the third, just as Sam rakes an iron knife across Nikita's throat. He parts at the cut like a sheet of blubber, and screams, doubles back. Lee and Jenn fall into line behind him.

Sam seizes the opportunity and scrambles the short distance to Dean. "Hey, hey--"

Dean groans, pushes up to his hands and knees. "What the fuck is your problem!" he shouts, in the general direction of mayhem. "I'm not even the dumb fuck who killed you, you douchebag! --No offense, Sam," he adds.

Kat dispatches Lee in a spray of rock salt, who leaves a cold trail of frost when she goes, and Nikita turns to Dean.

"Down--" Dean elbows Sam down, Sam hears the shot above him, and Auntie Jenn disappears in a plume of rock salt behind Kat.

Nikita screams.

"Dean, get off, off--" Sam tries to slide out from under his suddenly prone brother, and finds Nikita face to face with him. It's the closest Sam's been to Nikita, living or dead, and it's then Sam sees how young he is. Round pearls on his ears and around his neck make his face seem almost cherubic.

"Sam!" 

Sam jerks back, and a rogue spray of rock salt streaks past the tip of his nose. "Sam, are you okay?" Kat asks, breath ragged.

The crack of electricity. There's a bright surge behind Sam, and Sam pulls Kat into him with violent desperation. Dean, recovered, knocks both of them to the ground. Not ten feet away, the honeypot erupts into flame. 

Once the initial upthrust settles, Dean rolls from them, brushing plasticky embers from his shoulders. "Wondered when it was gonna do that," Dean pants. "Sammy, did you see?"

Sam shakes his head. Theory confirmed: Nikita's the ringleader, his screams a rallying cry. But how?

"Once a witch, always a witch. Ain't that the truth."

Dean makes a partition of Auntie Jenn. "Watch her neck."

"Gavin gave that to her," says Kat. A pearl necklace, right before she mists away.

Nikita was wearing one, too.

Sam feels Lee at his left. "Earrings," he breathes. He throws himself out of Lee's range and shoots.

"Nikita!" Dean roars. "Never could resist a little bling, could you!"

Sam does not have time to contemplate the sentience of ghosts, relative to each other, relative to human speech, but if he could, he would.

Then Nikita's on Dean, whisper close. Dean murmurs something indistinct, then, louder: "We used you again, buddy. And now we've got everything we'll ever need from you. Sam!"

"On it!" yells Kat, and pulls out an iHome remote. There's a rumbling boom chased by the jangle of fracturing ceramic, the ripping of metal as something explodes inside the Dumpster. Nikita Nekrasov follows suit screaming. 

"Yeah, yeah, takes one to no one. Bastard," Dean growls, as Nikita dusts from his boots.

There's a hiss of static, and Sam blinks blearily, eyes watering from the acrid, petrochemical smoke. They're riding it, Sam realizes. Lee and Jenn were in the smoke.

And Kat's too close.

"Kat," says Sam, with a hoarse, dizzying urgency.

She turns to him, and away from the smoke. "The jewelry's in the--"

"KAT!"

Lee and Jenn rush Kat's body and throw smoke down her throat with thin white hands. She doesn't get a chance to scream. The back of her skull makes a resounding crack against asphalt.

Sam thinks fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck and something shatters behind him, there's a resounding explosion behind him, a litany of additional fuck! fuck! fucks behind him. And then there's Kat.

"Kat--Katherine, Kat," Sam rasps, accompanied by a collection of still more useless words. She's not moving, everything is pounding around him, he can't (won't?) check her pulse, her breathing.

He chops her collarbone with both hands, untender. Kat yelps. "Oh," Sam coughs, coughs. "God."

Kat doesn't move. She's staring, dumbfounded, at the sky.

"Kat?"

He pulls her to sitting, and she brushes the back of her head gingerly. Her fingers come away clean, but trembling. "That's a big fucking fire," she croaks. Wipes soot and grime from her lips. Sam turns.

It's a really big fucking fire. Two big fucking fires, actually; one in the Dumpster, another, electric and pulsing thick black smoke past the retaining wall up into the sky. Dean, made grim and wraithlike as the smoke billowed out between them, on the other side. Conspicuous, but effective.

 "That doesn't usually happen when we do this," Kat and Sam say, only a beat off sync from one another.

Sam turns to Kat. "Good," he says.

"Surprising," she replies. "And I think I have a concussion."

"I know you do." Which is, frankly, the best news ever.

 "Sammy--?" Dean shouts, though the second half the word is choked out by a succession of short barking coughs.

Sam waves back. "Holy fuck."

Kat follow suit. "Holy fuck. Holy fuck."

They should do something about their obvious, urban, and extremely volatile electrical fires, but for now, Sam is content to let broken asphalt bite into his knees, skin hot and tight across his cheeks, and breathe.

Just breathe.

\--

She makes it look like a break-in. The urns, the jewelry--all of it was gone. What was left of Li Hing Ping and Auntie Jenn was gone. She breaks the locks and overturns tables and vandalizes the exterior of the funeral home. And as she buries their rescue in a petty, stupid crime, she wants, more than ever, to leave this place.

She didn't want to know about witches. She didn't want to know that certain ghosts could pull others into their service (though Sam assures her that's a new one). She doesn't want to know how. Kat draws the line just after ghosts. Ghosts, she'll take. Ghosts are a part of who she is now. Shakily, she reasons, there are more than enough of them to last a lifetime. And she wants them to move on, wants to help move them on.

I want to move on, she thinks. I want to leave this place.

The ghosts, of course, will follow her, and she will let them come.

She takes a deep breath, and welcomes herself back into the rough blaze that's Sam and Dean Winchester. They've let both fires run down to almost nothing. The first thing she hears:

"Well, it looks like your weirdly specific sartorial knowledge of Nikita Nekrasov saved the day, Dean. Congratulations." Sam neglects to mention her stunning supply of over-the-counter explosive agents, but why credit everyday tools, right?

"Next time _you_ can Carebear the next crazy person involved in a case. My treat. I won't even get jealous" Dean rotates his shoulder gingerly, muttering an even stream of tetchy nonsense. _Jesus christ, why is it always the walls, always with the wall-smashing, is there less fine motor control involved or what, if I were a ghost I'd get right to the neck-snapping, I don't understand the appeal of drawing things out,_ et cetera.

Kat hopes, but does not hold out for, the day these guys realize how weird they are. Maybe she's earned a backstage pass because of the whole ghost thing, but every time she walks in on them, that's what it sounds like. "So--!" she chimes in. "Artificial crime scene, check. Since we, you know, destroyed everything."

Sam shrugs. They don't seem overly concerned with the collateral. But in the scope of things, Kat figures, it's just stuff. Symbols, pieces of old routines, the reminder of memories. You can't keep everything.

"Everything else is salted, burned, extinguished, disposed of," Dean returns. "Tight ship, Kat. Good work."

"Uh, thanks."

Kat's never been complimented on a job--this kind of job--before. It doesn't seem appropriate somehow, to say something like that unironically, or bereft of sarcasm. The job's good if everyone lives; earning gold stars for participation seems overwrought. But to each their own; maybe it's different for them. What she's used to is the look on Gavin's face whenever they finished a case. He never helped--no planning, no research, no supply runs--but if she put the gun in his hands and instructions in his head, he'd do it. He'd do it for her. And when it was all over, he'd look at her, puffy-eyed and stricken, like her smile at the end of the night meant everything. In the morning, he'd care about her happiness, her sense of duty, her desire for another roll of tin foil for the kitchen, if he's already getting milk; but on those nights, he strips it down to her sheer existence. He strips it down to "I want you to live."

Kat's never been good at taking compliments. But that's okay, Gavin's never been good at giving them; it's the kind of skill that goes hand in hand with orchestrating good date nights. It's their deficiencies that make them good for each other.

They're good for each other.

"Kat."

"What? Oh, yeah, sure," Kat mumbles, and Dean chucks her DVD player into the Dumpster. He then begins to untangle the frazzled pile of electronics that comprised most of what used to be her living room. "Um, need any help?"

Sam shakes his head. "He'd rather die trying. He's a dumbass. I wouldn't worry about it."

Kat raises her eyebrows. Definitely missing something there. "Right. Hey, I was wondering if I could maybe… borrow your phone, since mine, uh." 

Sam feels around in his pockets. "Gavin?"

Kat nods. Hell yes, Gavin. That and an urgent care clinic; her head's killing her. But mostly Gavin. "I need to tell him." She takes the proffered phone and starts punching in the country code. "We're moving to Brazil, we're getting married, we're going to buy strollers with little truck wheels, we're--oh, this is about to be an international call, so--"

"Whoa whoa whoa," Sam jumps forward, grabs her hand.

"So _I'll pay you back,_ don't worry." Kat tries to pull away from Sam, but he grips her tighter. "Hey, don't."

Reluctantly, he releases her. "Look," he says. 

Her television hits the bottom of the Dumpster with a hollow crash behind them.

"No, you look. I'm not a little girl chasing after some prince," says Kat. "We just exorcised three ghosts. I get it."

"That has nothing to do with--"

"Don't Carebear me, Sam, I--"

"You--what?"

"Dean said earlier--I thought it was a… That's not a thing, is it, you guys have your own little vernacular going on, so I just figured… Yeah, okay, never mind. Just--

"This discussion is over, Sam."

"Look. From one… ghost-hunting felon to another, don't jump into anything after one wild night."

Kat can't keep the rude incredulity from her face. "One wild night is why I'm here, burning bodies behind my apartment in the first place."

"Yeah, exactly." Sam offers her an apologetic grimace. "So just… Buy a new phone. Don't expedite shipping--take that time and think about it. Don't live next door to a funeral home. Find a city with a better crime rate. Find an apartment complex where someone gives a damn if people are screaming, and shooting things, and their Dumpsters are on fire. Start there, okay?"

Kat crosses her arms. "You realize I can accomplish the same thing by moving to Brazil, right?"

"So _visit_ Brazil. Get your boyfriend to teach you Portuguese. Fall in love with it before you're forced to, and you're faking it 'til you make it… you know? You have plenty of time." Sam takes a shuddering breath. "And trust me, it takes everything I have, and everything I am, to say this to you--to me, to anyone.

"You have plenty of time."

\--

"You let her borrow your phone?"

Dean is limping. Sam tries to match his pace, but it's almost excruciating. Sam wants nothing more than to rush to the car, jump in, and find some place to knock out for a few hours.

It's almost dawn again. Twenty-four hours ago, Sam was also wishing he was asleep, and driving instead. This is the problem with stasis: You never actually want to be the thing you're stuck in. And yet, in about five minutes, Sam's going to be driving again, the sun's going to rise again, and they're going to do it all over again, in a slightly different down, averting a slightly different crisis, slogging through the exact same bullshit. He's glad Kat found some direction tonight, whether he agrees with her newfound commitments or not. Because to Sam, it's still all just a bunch of bullshit.

Suddenly, there's a whoosh past Sam's arm. "Oh, fuck--" Before Sam can catch him, Dean goes down in a lopsided sort of way. Maybe he tripped on a slab of uneven pavement in the half-dark, who knows. Adjusting the straps of their duffel against his other shoulder, Sam tries to pull him back up, but Dean doesn't go for it, like his knees wouldn't support him if he made it back up that far. He doesn't seem that hurt, not in any concern-worthy sense; Sam figures he's probably got some massive ghost bruising, but what else is new. Bone-tired is probably more apt.

"You're rethinking your little TV-throwing coda right about now, aren't you. And yeah, I let Kat borrow my phone. She's booking a flight," Sam explains, as he scans the parking lot for the Impala. There she is--matte in the muted twilight.

"Seriously?"

"She's looking at flights to book after she clears the vacation time with her boss," Sam amends. He interlocks one arm with Dean's, and waits for his cue.  
 "Yeah, because that was the surprising part of that statement."

Sam coughs. There's something about Dean that broadcasts exhaustion beyond stress headaches and bags under his eyes. It's probably not specific to Dean, but it's particular to Sam's understanding of him, and he reads it in the way Dean runs his tongue over his chapped lips, the lituus cast to his shoulders as he tries to put himself back together from the ground up. It is a part of his brother Sam would not mind losing. The rest of him, Sam pulls upward. 

"There we go. Listen, Dean--" he says, urging Dean in the direction of the Impala. He gives him a gentle shove to the back.

"Not this again." Dean groans, and the exhaustion surges into misplaced vitriol and murderous intent, like a leaf being taken up in the swell of a drain.  
 "Dean--"

"We've been through this. I just want to go h-- I just want to get out of here, Sam, so leave it."

"Right, because, you don't want to 'deal' with me. Well guess what, Dean, that's too b--"

Dean abruptly jabs his elbow backward, throws his arm across Sam's chest and pushes back hard. "Whoa there, partner. You don't have the high ground here, Sam," he warns. "It's always something, with you, you always--"

Sam shoves back. "Hey." Yes, fantastic. This is exactly what they both need right now. Just fantastic. "Watch it. I can put you right back on your ass right now, and you know it."

"Back off." Dean spits. "'Cause you know what, this needs to be said. You always assume there's something wrong with me--"

"Not this again." 

Unchecked, Dean can go 0 to 90 in a matter of seconds, and fuck ramping up. Sam just heard the starting gun.

"No, seriously, Sam. Don't give me that face. I need to know, what do you see in me, what do you see in me that you think it's more likely I'm off my goddamn rocker--"

Sam pinches the bridge of his nose. "Jesus christ, Dean."

"--you never believe it's something supernatural, you saw Nikita, you knew it was a curse, and you still--"

 "For the love of--"

"No, fucking listen to me--"

Sam shoves Dean backward again. Dean slams into the Impala, staggers a little. "I don't know what I see in you, Dean," Sam pants. "And that's what terrifies me. It terrifies me, okay? Because I don't know--I just don't know. But right now I see someone who wants to start a fucking shouting match in a fucking parking lot, when all I want to do is leave this fucking place. So can we go?"

But when Dean gets tired, he falls into ruts, and this one is angry, and livid, and it's not going to stand for any of Sam's bullshit. Apparently.

"You always--"

"Oh for fuck's sake, Dean." For lack of a better punching bag, Sam flings the duffel and all the artillery inside against the side of the Impala. It hits the ground with a heavy thud. "That's the point of this whole fucking mess. I was wrong at first, okay? That was days ago--almost a week ago. Since then? You've just been proving my point." 

Sam's spent years bearing witness to Dean's various tailspins. If this time around there was actually a curse involved, then power to it. Sam's bad. But it was a stupid curse--because its function is supposed to be, what? Gossip? It was just a stupid curse in the wrong place, at the wrong time, borne out by the wrong person with the wrong kind of history. This level of fallout--that's all Dean, and Sam knows it. Normal people shoulder this kind of curse and find out their boyfriend's cheating on them, that the barista told all his co-workers that he thinks you're a tool for ordering one big latte in two small cups. But whatever the world's saying about Dean Winchester, it all cycles back into their own apocalyptic little clusterfuck. And that's getting harder and harder to avoid, even on normal days. _That's_ their curse.

Sam takes a deep breath. He's committed to fighting Dean on this, though at the moment he'd settle for just fighting Dean, period. But he tries to take the tempo down a notch. "Would you rather have it the other way around? Do you seriously want me to wake up and think, Gee, Dean's sure acting weird today. He must have been cursed by a witch again?"  
 "Yes," Dean snarls. And then he's shouting again. "BECAUSE THAT'S YOUR JOB, SAM."

"Right, great, it's like 4am, Dean, keep shouting--"

"WITCHES ARE your fucking job, Sam--"

"--get the cops called on us. That'll be great--"

"We could've brought down a drug lord with all that bullshit just now; obviously the neighbors don't give a damn what happens here. That's what you're supposed to _do,_ what you're supposed to see--"

"You act weird every day, Dean," Sam hisses. "We act weird every day. It's been so long that most days I forget what normal even felt like. All this bullshit"--Sam gestures expansively--"starts sounding right."

"We've never been normal, Sam."

"--but we've been a hell of a lot closer to it."

"Well strap in and nut up, Sam, because this is normal, this is what we get; this is as fine as we are ever going to be, so--"

"I know."

Dean halts, like Sam's thrown him off his momentum just far enough to break gravity. He tries to catch his breath, looks almost like he's headed toward collapse all over again. Diffused. Shaky from sleep deprivation. Pale.

"I know," Sam repeats; quick breath, because if he stops, he'll never finish, "that you're probably right."

"Sammy--"

"And that's why I've got your back--shut up, Dean--because--Look. You break a curse, and you're back to normal, like magic."

"That's because it _is_ magic, Sam."

Sam ignores him. "--and this is different--this--is really fucking different. So try to see where I'm coming from here. I never--" 

And this suddenly feels like the dumbest, wrongest thing he's ever said. Sam is his own land mine, jesus christ. He should just gear up preemptively, brace himself for the moment Dean blows him off all over again: "

"I never want to make that mistake with you, Dean."

Dean won't look at him. He shifts imperceptibly, but for the scritch of loose asphalt beneath his boots.

"I just--I can't."

Sam wipes his hands down his face, ends with his palms together, pressed to his lips.

"…What do you want me to say to that," asks Dean eventually, timbreless and uncadenced. "What am I-- supposed to say to you."

"Nothing," Sam realizes, and it's a good realization. Even liberating, maybe. "I don't need you to say anything." 

Sam's got this. And if he doesn't, then he's going to work until he figures it out.

"Hey, does this mean we're going to Brazil, too?" Sam has all the guns locked back in the trunk by the time Dean finds his voice again. Like nothing has happened. 

Sam plays along. Some lies are worth participating in.

He kicks a can under the Impala, fixates on the gray screech down her body, luminous in the half-dark. "So you heard that. Is this some kind of new side effect we should be worried about? It is at least satellite radio this time?"

"I was right there." Dean bends to inspect the Impala too, slowly, stiffly. He squints, runs his hands along the gray. Dean rubs at the scratch, and wipes the dust on his jeans. "Eh, she's fine," he whispers to himself.

Sam raises his eyebrows at that. "Seriously?" 

"Of course I was there. I'm always right here, Sam." Dean groans when he straightens up, steadies himself with the Impala. Sam watches the pain settle into Dean, or Dean settle into the pain. Something like that. 

Dean's only a little breathless when he continues, "I was gonna ask you--the world's got plenty of time to settle down later, huh? We've all got long lives, warm beaches, and the healing sands of time ahead of us? That's your takeaway here?"

"No, not everyone; I'm not an idiot. But she does."

Sam hears someone shout his name from high above. He squints. 

It's Kat, waving his phone. Right, she borrowed it. Beside her there's a hulking garbage bag with the edge of Auntie Jenn in grayscale and several peonies peeking out from the top.

Some people get ripped to shreds. They bleed out. They burn from the core outward. They disappear, as though they never were. They disappear in increments, and those around them forget that there are pieces missing. They disappear, despite their best efforts, or none at all. Not everyone gets their sunset. But fuck sunsets anyway--even fewer are gonna get their sunrise the next day, and the next, and the next, and the next. It's the sunrise you want.

Sam watches bright orange casserole after bright orange casserole fly against the lid of the Dumpster as Kat chucks them in, like lumpy Frizbees illuminated unto bioluminscence by the thready sunlight filtering through the chain-link fence.

"God, I want one."

"Dean, no."

 Something between a grimace and a smile. "Then we should ask if we can borrow her couch."

"Dude, that's creepy. We're already way beyond the friend-zone here, so--"

"Nah, Sammy. That _is_ friendship."

The sunrise is blinding.

[closing credits: "How You Like Me Now?" - The Heavy](https://app.box.com/s/7p9anrxn5lw525w9e1wm)

* * *

**end.**

**Author's Note:**

> \+ The real Nikita Nekrasov is a mathematical physicist and string theorist. He is not a witch, and not dead.
> 
> \+ This fic was written for DESERTPORT at SPN_SUMMERGEN 2013. The prompt was "Dean is cursed to hear everything said aloud about him." I've also written a **[director's commentary](http://kalliel.livejournal.com/222246.html)** to this piece.
> 
> Comments, constructive criticism, inquiries, &c are revered! ♥


End file.
